Ten Ton Hammer and a number of fansites and community representatives were invited to a Blizzard press conference with J. Allen Brack, Lead Producer on World of Warcraft. We had a chance to voice a few questions from our WoW community as Brack touched on a number of hotbutton and general interest topics for WoW players.

In addition to the standard questions about lore, raid difficulty, the Warcraft movie, of particular interest were Brack's responses regarding the mood inside the studio after news of Cataclysm leaked out weeks before BlizzCon, level 80 accounts sold and "laundered" by a Battle.net merge, and why levels 1-5 weren't playable for Worgen and Goblin characters at BlizzCon.

From the article:

"The reason we started you at level 6 for goblin is because level 1-5 wasnt done, and we really wanted to have both experiences playable at BlizzCon. On the worgen side, you start out as a human. You go through this experience where youre affected by the curse, so you actually unlock your worgen form. That was something that we felt like: its a great experience, but probably not a great BlizzCon experience. When you sit down and you want to play the worgen and you look like just another human. Maybe its a bit of a letdown. But we have extensive plans for 1-5, we just werent ready to show it to you."

About The Author

Jeff's interest in online games stretches back to organizing neighborhood Unreal tournaments as a teenager, but when a college roommate introduced him to EverQuest, an interest became an obsession. Jeff joined the Ten Ton Hammer team in 2004 covering EverQuest II, and he's had his hands on just about every PC online and multiplayer game since.